The Idiosyncrasy: Your Drink on Your Business Card

Tired of bartenders getting your drink wrong? Esquire food correspondent John Mariani has devised a new and fool-proof technique to make sure you get what you asked for.

Since there are only about a half dozen true bartenders left in the world, with the rest barely capable of making anything other than vodka martinis, I decided that the only way I'd ever get a classic daiquiri, straight up, was to have the recipe printed on the back of my business card so I could hand it to the person behind the bar who might otherwise make it with strawberries or bananas, on the rocks or frozen.

Ever since I had the cards done, with a picture of the cocktail glass I want it served in, I've been getting exactly the daiquiri named after the Cuban town of Daiquiri, where, after the Spanish-American War, Americans came to run the mines, spending off-hours drinking local rum with local lime juice and local sugar.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was the first to mention it in print, in This Side of Paradise (1920), and Hemingway--who drank his daiquiris without sugar--wrote of the cocktail, "The frappéd part of the drink was like the wake of a ship and the clear part was the way the water looked when the bow cut it when you were in shallow water over marl bottom. That was almost the exact color."

A drink so perfect demands respect. And knowledge. So I have my cards.

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